Op-ed: E-sports cannot fight segregation with segregation

The reversal of one "men-only" tourney isn't enough to save e-sports.

Look closely at this International e-Sports Federation promotional image. See any women? Us either.

International e-Sports Federation

On Tuesday, a sub-reddit dedicated to the video game Hearthstone exploded with discussion. A Finnish e-sports tournament had just been announced, and the Helsinki event, scheduled for July 31, would include a competition based on the Blizzard-produced card-battle game, complete with a grand prize of €1,000 and free travel to the tournament's world finals in November.

While Hearthstone is a relatively young game, and less intense than other popular video games in the e-sports world, its inclusion in a big tournament was indicative of both its popularity and the quickly growing nature of e-sports in general. However, that's not why it was the topic of reddit users' conversation. Rather, user Karuta posted the tourney's rules and highlighted a strange stipulation: only men need apply.

As people dug in to the tournament's details, they found that the whole affair was divided into male- and female-only categories, and worse, women were invited to fewer competitions. Starcraft 2 will be played by both men and women in separate tournaments, while Dota 2 and Hearthstone tourneys were announced as male-only. (A curious separation came in fighting games, where men will face off in Ultra Street Fighter IV, and women will fight in Tekken Tag Tournament 2.) These stipulations were all due to rules attached to the eventual, final competition, hosted by South Korea's International e-Sports Federation (IeSF).

Public outcry came swiftly, and within less than a day, IeSF posted an update that hinted at a reversal of course. "Our top priority is to promote e-sports in the best ways we can," the company posted to its Facebook page. "We believe that listening is important, and we're now collecting your opinions from the social media, and we will update soon." [Update: That course has been fully reversed as of Thursday morning.]

But that reversal only came after IeSF posted some odd defenses for its original gender-split initiative. In two separate Facebook posts, the company mentioned "international sports regulations" that divided competitions into male and female divisions, particularly chess—even though the World Chess Championships famously include women in the main competition. Another defense stated that women are in the e-sports minority, and therefore, female-only competitions were meant "to promote female gaming on a global scale."

Tiger Woods vs. Aris Bakhtanians

It's all baffling stuff when considering the state of e-sports in the West. Competitive gaming racks up plenty of viewers on Twitch and other online platforms in the United States and other Western nations, but its popularity absolutely pales compared to the likes of South Korea and other Eastern countries.

Similarly, ratings and ticket sales for women's sports leagues are dwarfed by their male counterparts, and in these cases, the divide in athletic prowess may very well be relevant (even though America's women's national soccer team soundly trounces its male peers in international competition). But in the case of non-athletic competition—which, admittedly, doesn't attract giant ratings—women have enjoyed plenty of attention and popularity in mixed-gender competition, as evidenced by the likes of poker tournaments, for example.

If anybody expects e-sports to see wider adoption and popularity, the field needs more—and better—competitors from a more diverse pool. But if e-sports expect to attract their own assumption-busting Tiger Woods or Yao Ming, they'll need to do much more than create fenced-in competitions for women. They need to prove that lessons have been learned since 2012, when an explosion of inappropriate and hateful moments hampered e-sports' slowly growing popularity in the West.

In particular, a live-streamed series of Street Fighter Vs. Tekken matches, officially hosted by game producer Capcom, was tarnished by comments from competitor Aris Bakhtanians.

After saying, "if you remove [sexual harassment] from the fighting game community, it's not the fighting game community," he defended the use of specifically anti-woman language: "There's nothing unacceptable about that. These are people, we're in America, man, this isn't North Korea. We can say what we want." Additionally, Bakhtanians raised eyebrows by aiming the Web-series' cameras at a female participant while commenting on her feet and thighs.

Within a week, Starcraft 2's e-sports field saw its own controversy emerge when a top international player, who went by the nickname Orb, was called out for repeatedly using racist language while chatting during matches. Roughly a year later, a top South Korean female player retired from Starcraft 2 competitive play over issues of blatant harassment.

Gaming’s Joe Montana? (Not the Sega Genesis version)

E-sport legitimacy already faces the uphill battle of convincing TV viewers that a person twiddling joysticks behind a screen is in any way comparable to the prowess of Michael Jordan or Joe Montana. It's going to take the efforts of up-and-coming, die-hard gaming superstars to reverse that course, but many of those players in the field's minorities will be the wisest to its worst stories.

Joe Schmoe probably doesn't know about Hearthstone, let alone its reddit forum, but competitive players certainly do. They're the Starcraft and Street Fighter addicts who comb message boards, study up on play techniques, sign up for regional tournaments, and encounter hateful speech and moronic practices on the regular. They're the ones who could bring compelling, diverse stories to the genre—the stuff that game broadcast announcers would kill for—and that means e-sports' biggest promoters and organizers need to huddle together and take inclusion seriously.

Today, it costs less to buy a functional gaming computer (or tablet) than a full set of athletic gear, meaning e-sports' barrier to entry is ridiculously low. More people than ever can tap their way to a killer Hearthstone deck or destroy mobs en route to Dota 2 supremacy. We can only hope that somebody smart springboards off of today's awkward gender-division story to invite and encourage the diversity that e-sports' next great tournament series deserves.